There’s No Such Thing as Stupid People

But there are certainly stupid, asinine attempts at “investigative” reporting:

A few factual corrections:

“Detroit sucks, but why? Well to start, it’s no secret that Detroit is run entirely by Leftists. Every single mayor of Detroit since 1961 has been a liberal. It is the city of entitlement programs.”

Yeah, and every mayor of Boston and Chicago has been a Democrat since 1930 and 1931, respectively. But Boston has the 8^th highest housing prices in the nation, and Chicago is currently the 3^rd most populous American city. Both Boston and Chicago have enjoyed Democratic dominance far longer than Detroit, yet continue to be prosper at the aggregate level. The obvious rebuttal to Crowder’s report is the classic “correlation does not mean causation” statement, but that would imply Crowder actually illustrated a correlation between, well, anything.

“How did it get this way? It all started with Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh in 1961.”

Yeah, well, no. Crowder is about 30 years late in his pseudo-historical analysis, as the well-documented decline of Detroit began with the major auto manufacturers—not the auto unions—in the 1930s and 40s. Federal highway construction as a military mobilization tool aided industrial decentralization and the racially restrictive postwar housing boom, and, you guessed it, Detroit’s affluent residents fled en masse. Unfounded fear of a growing murder rate combined with racial resentment over school desegregation measures and the Detroit metro region morphed into a chocolate city with vanilla suburbs by the late 1970s. This meticulously documented social and economic change—the actual root of the city’s decline—came well before contemporary UAW bargaining agreements, the housing crisis, or even Kwame Kilpatrick’s indiscretions.

To suggest that Detroit somehow represents the archetype of Democratic leadership is either grossly dishonest or insanely stupid. A cursory view of any map of home foreclosures, population loss, or median household income decline illustrates a clear geographic pattern: The deindustrialized Rust Belt, northern Florida and much of California have been the hardest hit by our most recent recession. The states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Florida and California are all in serious trouble, and their respective histories and contemporary troubles run much deeper than simple party politics.

Oh, and that scene at the end? The one of the Michigan Central Depot, a bombed out former train station? That building is actually owned by a billionaire trucking tycoon, and closed down in the 80s during the Reagan era of, er, prosperity. It has nothing to do with auto bailouts, or Democratic politicians, or teacher’s unions. If anything, it represents the effects of economic excess and corporate neglect.

Like many journalists before him, Crowder is a lazy opportunist. I understand his schtick—the cutesy, hip young conservative that serves up clever quips against liberal politics. But if this simplistic garbage is any indication of the relative intellect of young conservatives, well, their "movement" leaves a lot to be desired.

Dangerous Implications

In the months preceding December’s blockbuster explosion, two films have been dominating the box office: Lee Daniels’ Precious and John Lee Hancock’s The Blindside. Both films are based on critically acclaimed books and both take issues of racial inequality head-on. Albeit for different reasons, both films have also been lauded as inspiring stories of racial uplift.

I’d love to offer glowing reviews of both films, noting their sophisticated and nuanced take on contemporary race relations. I’d love to submit my own adoration for their careful depictions of disadvantage, dealing with complex and often contradictory emotions with honest realism. Most importantly, I’d love to express my satisfaction with their innovative explorations of solutions—some policy-relevant commentary, perhaps—to the problems of urban poverty vividly portrayed in each film.

But in reality, Precious is more of a shortsighted journey into insulated dysfunction, while The Blindside is closer to a condescending fairytale of Christian charity cure-alls.

Precious portrays internal, inner-city pathos like no film before it. The film’s main character, Precious, is morbidly obese, sixteen years old in the 8^th grade, pregnant with her second child from her father, living in abject poverty with her physically and emotionally abusive mother, and HIV-positive to boot. The film itself follows her through a particularly difficult period in her life, from the welfare office to the fried chicken spot to the alternative school where she can finally express herself—through writing in a journal, of course. But it rings of reality, and, anachronisms aside, speaks a few truths of urban poverty.

Yet the excessive focus on internal dysfunction and pathology ignores the role of external forces—be they shifts in the economy or social policy reforms—in perpetuating the conditions from which Precious emerges. For viewers ignorant to criminal justice reforms in the last two decades or AFDC or economic decentralization or employment discrimination, Precious provides a simplistic message of fried chicken loving, psychologically disturbed welfare queens. The system failed Precious well before her birth, but this reality of poverty is all but obscured by flying frying pans and hairy pigs’ feet. And the uplifting ending? Precious’ triumphant awakening as she exits the welfare office, finally standing up to her mother? It’s hard to forget that she’s still 16, with two mentally retarded children, homeless, no job, and slowly dying of AIDS. Forgive me for not feeling empowered.

The Blindside provides a glimpse into what Precious’ life could have been…had rich white people in Tennessee adopted her. The Blindside is based on the true story of Michael Oher, a homeless black teenager who’s athletic ability found him enrolled in a Memphis prep school. The gentle giant is ultimately adopted by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy after the Good Christian family discovers that poor Michael is, well, poor. They take Michael into their home and find him a tutor, raising his GPA to make him eligible for a college football scholarship. Michael ultimately “chooses” a scholarship from Ole Miss (his adopted parents are alums and boosters), and, as of the 2009 season, suits up for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens. For two hours of racial Kum Bay Ya, the white family accepts the black teenager without so much as an inkling of reservation, and the black teenager accepts the “crazy white people” without ever seriously questioning their intentions.

That’s not to say that The Blindside doesn’t include flashes of racial brilliance. In one scene, Leigh Anne (Michael Oher’s adopted mother, played by Sandra Bullock) has lunch with three of her affluent, white, female friends. One friend asks her how she can possibly feel comfortable with a big black boy in her home—she does have a teenage daughter, after all. Leigh Anne looks her square in the eyes, and with piercing subtlety, quietly states “Shame on you” as she leaves the restaurant. Later that night, she pulls her daughter aside and asks her—in a far less subtle tone—if she feels comfortable with Michael sleeping next door. She’s cool with it, but this mother-daughter awkwardness isn't the point of the scene. Rather, it illustrates the daily internal negotiations among socially conscious whites, constantly balancing pervasive stereotypes with their own moral inclinations. Racial literacy is a process, not a character trait, and this honest scene is quite powerful.

Ultimately, there are good scenes and bad scenes in each film. Yet both end with deeply problematic, insidious implications: Precious relegates disadvantage to internal pathos, and The Blindside perpetuates the dubious fairytale that a little bit of individual charity can solve group-level social problems. Why does concentrated poverty persist? Must be because the lives of poor African-Americans are in disarray as a result of drug abuse and parental neglect. And what can we do about it? Find some nice white people, and adopt all the helpless black children.

Internal dysfunction, solved with external charity. Not exactly the sophisticated portrayal of racial inequality I had hoped for.

Article-Level Metrics And The Evolution Of Scientific Impact

Neylon C, Wu S (2009) Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact. PLoS Biol 7(11): e1000242. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242 / Published: November 17, 2009

Formally published papers that have been through a traditional prepublication peer review process remain the most important means of communicating science today. Researchers depend on them to learn about the latest advances in their fields and to report their own findings. The intentions of traditional peer review are certainly noble: ... . In principle, this system enables science to move forward on the collective confidence of previously published work. Unfortunately, the traditional system has inspired methods of measuring impact that are suboptimal for their intended use.

Measuring Impact

Peer-reviewed journals have served an important purpose in evaluating submitted papers and readying them for publication. In theory, one could browse the pages of the most relevant journals to stay current with research on a particular topic. But as the scientific community has grown, so has the number of journals—to the point where over 800,000 new articles appeared in PubMed in 2008 ... and the total is now over 19 million ... . The sheer number makes it impossible for any scientist to read every paper relevant to their research, and a difficult choice has to be made about which papers to read. Journals help by categorizing papers by subject, but there remain in most fields far too many journals and papers to follow.

As a result, we need good filters for quality, importance, and relevance to apply to scientific literature. There are many we could use but the majority of scientists filter by preferentially reading articles from specific journals—1those they view as the highest quality and the most important. These selections are highly subjective but the authors' personal experience is that most scientists, when pressed, will point to the Thomson ISI Journal Impact Factor [1] as an external and “objective” measure for ranking the impact of specific journals and the individual articles within them.

Yet the impact factor, which averages the number of citations per eligible article in each journal, is deeply flawed both in principle and in practice as a tool for filtering the literature. It is mathematically problematic ... with around 80% of a journal impact factor attributable to around 20% of the papers, even for journals like Nature ... . It is very sensitive to the categorisation of papers as “citeable” ... and it is controlled by a private company that does not have any obligation to make the underlying data or processes of analysis available. [snip]

Though the impact factor is flawed, it may be useful for evaluating journals in some contexts, and other more sophisticated metrics for journals are emerging ... . But for the job of assessing the importance of specific papers, the impact factor—or any other journal-based metric for that matter—cannot escape an even more fundamental problem: it is simply not designed to capture qualities of individual papers.

Article-Level Metrics

If choosing which articles to read on the basis of journal-level metrics is not effective, then we need a measure of importance that tells us about the article. It makes sense that when choosing which of a set of articles to read, we should turn to “article-level metrics,” yet in practice data on individual articles are rarely considered, let alone seriously measured.

Perhaps the main reason for this absence is a practical one. Accurate determining the importance of an article takes years and is very difficult to do objectively. The “gold standard” of article impact is formal citations in the scholarly literature, but citation metrics have their own challenges. One is that citation metrics do not take the “sentiment” of the citation into account, so while an article that is heavily cited for being wrong is perhaps important in its own way ... , using citation counts without any context can be misleading. The biggest problem, though, is the time-delay inherent in citations. [snip]

The Trouble with Comments

A common solution proposed for getting rapid feedback on scientific publications is inspired by the success of many Web-based commenting forums. Sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and Hacker News each have an expert community that contributes new information and debates its value and accuracy. It is not difficult to imagine translating this dynamic into a scholarly research setting where scientists discuss interesting papers. A spirited, intelligent comment thread can also help raise the profile of an article and engage the broader community in a conversation about the science.

Unfortunately, commenting in the scientific community simply hasn't worked, at least not generally. [snip]

[snip]

Part of this resistance to commenting may relate to technical issues, but the main reason is likely social. For one thing, researchers are unsure how to behave in this new space. We are used to criticizing articles in the privacy of offices and local journal clubs, not in a public, archived forum. [snip]

Another issue is that the majority of people making hiring and granting decisions do not consider commenting a valuable contribution. [snip]

Then there is simply the size of the community. [snip] But it also means that if only 100 people read a paper, it will be lucky if even one of them leaves a comments

Technical Solutions to Social Problems

Given the lack of incentive, are there ways of capturing article-level metrics from what researchers do anyway? A simple way of measuring interest in a specific paper might be via usage and download statistics; for example, how many times a paper has been viewed or downloaded, how many unique users have shown an interest, or how long they lingered. [snip] These statistics may not be completely accurate but they are consistent, comparable, and considered sufficiently immune to cheating to be the basis for a billion dollar Web advertising industry.

A more important criticism of download statistics is that it is a crude measure of actual use. How many of the downloaded papers are even read, let alone digested in detail and acted upon? What we actually want to measure is how much influence an article has, not how many people clicked on the download button thinking they “might read it later.” A more valuable metric might be the number of people who have actively chosen to include the paper in their own personal library. [snip]

Examples of such tools are Zotero, Citeulike, Connotea, and Mendeley, which all allow the researcher to collect papers into their library while they are browsing on the Web, often in a single click using convenient “bookmarklets.” The user usually has the option of adding tags, comments, or ratings as part of the bookmarking process. [snip]

Metrics collected by reference management software are especially intriguing because they offer a measure of active interest without requiring researchers to do anything more than what they are already doing. Scientists collect the papers they find interesting, take notes on them, and store the information in a place that is accessible and useful to them. [snip]

Part of the solution to encouraging valuable contributions, then, may simply be that the default settings involve sharing and that people rarely change them. A potentially game-changing incentive, however, may be the power to influence peers. [snip]

It is too early to tell whether any specific tools will last, but they already demonstrate an important principle: a tool that works within the workflow that researchers are already using can more easily capture and aggregate useful information. [snip]

The Great Thing about Metrics…Is That There Are So Many to Choose From

There are numerous article-level metrics ... and each has its own advantages and problems. Citation counts are an excellent measure of influence and impact but are very slow to collect. Download statistics are rapid to collect but may be misleading. Comments can provide valuable and immediate feedback, but are currently sparse ... .. Bookmarking statistics can be both rapid to collect and contain high quality information but are largely untested and require the widespread adoption of unfamiliar tools. Alongside these we have “expert ratings” by services such as Faculty of 1000 and simple rating schemes.

[snip]

“Other Indicators of Impact” include ratings and comments, which, like page views, are immediate but may offer more insight because users are more likely to have read the article and found it compelling enough to respond. Additional other indicators are bookmarks, used by some people to keep track of articles of interest to them, and blog posts and trackbacks, which indicate where else on the Web the article has been mentioned and can be useful for linking to a broader discussion. It is clear that all of the types of data provide different dimensions, which together can give a clearer picture of an article's impact.

[snip] As recently shown ... , scientific impact is not a simple concept that can be described by a single number. The key point is that journal impact factor is a very poor measure of article impact. And, obviously, the fact that an article is highly influential by any measure does not necessarily mean it should be.

Many researchers will continue to rely on journals as filters, but the more you can incorporate effective filtering tools into your research process, the more you will stay up-to-date with advancing knowledge. The question is not whether you should take article-level metrics seriously but how you can use them most effectively to assist your own research endeavours. We need sophisticated metrics to ask sophisticated questions about different aspects of scientific impact and we need further research into both the most effective measurement techniques and the most effective uses of these in policy and decision making. For this reason we strongly support efforts to collect and present diverse types of article-level metrics without any initial presumptions as to which metric is most valuable. [snip]

As Clay Shirky famously said ... , you can complain about information overload but the only way to deal with it is to build and use better filters. It is no longer sufficient to depend on journals as your only filter; instead, it is time to start evaluating papers on their own merits. Our only options are to publish less or to filter more effectively, and any response that favours publishing less doesn't make sense, either logistically, financially, or ethically. The issue is not how to stop people from publishing, it is how to build better filters, both systematically and individually. At the same time, we can use available tools, networks, and tools built on networks to help with this task.

So in the spirit of science, let's keep learning and experimenting, and keep the practice and dissemination of science evolving for the times.

References

Source

[http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000242]

!!! Thanks To / Garrett Eastman / Librarian / Rowland Institute at Harvard / For The HeadsUp !!!

>>> While These Insights and Suggestions Are An Important Contribution To The Conversation , In Many Ways The Views And Recommendation Are Far From Radical <<<

See My Presentation Delivered At the Workshop On Peer Review, Trieste, Italy, May 23-24 2003

"Alternative Peer Review: Quality Management for 21st Century Scholarship"

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/APR-1.ppt]

>>> See In Particular > 'Seize The E! Section >>> Embrace the potential of the digital environment to facilitate access, retrieval, use, and navigation of electronic scholarship.

>>It's A Large PPT (200+ Slides) But IMHO ... Well Worth The Experience [:-)]<<

AND

The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases

[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm]

To ReQuote T.S. Elloit >

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?"/ T.S. Eliot / The Rock (1934) pt.1

To Quote Me >

"It's Not About Publication, It's About Ideas"

>> We Now Have The Computational Power To Make Real-Time Conceptual Navigation An EveryDay Occurrence <<<

!! Let Us Use It To Navigate Ideas !!!

Indeed Let Us Continue "... experimenting, and keep the practice and dissemination of science evolving for the times."

See Also/Related

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/09/article-level-metrics-at-plos-addition.html]

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/06/article-level-metrics-at-plos-and.html]

Representing Reality with Integrity

Few television shows have received as much academic praise as HBO’s The Wire. From City Hall to the classroom to the street corner, The Wire brilliantly captured the heart and soul of urban America—the same heart and soul meticulously detailed in countless academic studies of urban inequality.

Yet the scholars that research urban America rarely come into contact with the actors that portray urban America in television or film. That is, until two weeks ago when three actors from The Wire—Andre Royo (Bubbles the junkie), Sonja Sohn (Kima the detective), and Michael Williams (Omar the stickup artist)—sat down with three scholars—Harvard sociologists William Julius Wilson and Larry Bobo, and Yale graduate student/Baltimore native Brandon Terry—to discuss the social policy implications and lessons from the show.

After the panel, Royo, Song, and Willams were escorted to a private after-party at The Harvard Lampoon, a building that houses the Harvard undergraduate humor magazine of the same name. Since the panel’s moderator is also my colleague in the Sociology department, I received a highly coveted (and much appreciated) invite to the party.

As a huge fan of the show, I could barely contain myself. I tried my best to keep it cool, keeping my camera in my pocket and resisting the urge to ask for an autograph. But when I sparked a conversation with Andre Royo, my composure started to fade. See, Bubs was my favorite character on the show, and Royo’s brilliant and careful portrayal of the homeless drug addict made my admiration for the character that much stronger. After a geek-out session about the show’s integration of professional actors with actual Baltimore natives (we went back and forth for a good five minutes listing each and every B-more local that appeared on the show), we started to talk about the inherent difficulty of portraying junkie.

Of course, playing a junkie isn’t that difficult, if the whole twitching-and-randomly-scratching-yourself caricature is your thing. But fans of The Wire know that Bubbles wasn’t your average junkie. There was an art to the way Royo played Bubs, a unique take on a classic character that fundamentally changed the way we approach “the junkie:” We never pitied him when he fell, but rather rooted for him to rise back up. In a strange way, the down-and-out junkie was the show’s most consistent hero.

According to Royo, a few unpaid consultants helped him develop the character. These consultants showed up at his trailer each morning, followed him and the production crew throughout Baltimore, and advised him through each and every scene. When he threw away a cigarette before smoking it to the filter, for example, they were quick to correct his mistake. How were they privy to the intimate details of life as a junkie? Because these consultants weren’t really consultants at all: They were the men and women that lived their lives on the streets of Baltimore. The very men and women Royo’s character was based on.

After each day, he’d retire to his trailer and remove his makeup. “And when I’d walk out,” he told me, “I looked at these people that had helped me all day, and I could see the betrayal in their eyes. At the end of the day, I could get cleaned up and go home, while they spent the night on the street. They looked at me like a sellout. It [messed] with my head for a long time.” Royo would feel depressed, and after particularly long days he often needed to spend time alone, away from everyone, to gather his thoughts. Here were men and women that could barely get by, struggling with addiction, and Royo was exploiting their lived experiences to get a paycheck. I asked Royo how he dealt with the guilt. “I just tried to portray the character—their world—with humanity. That’s all I could really do,” he replied. “But it was hard for me, emotionally.”

Detailing the lives of marginalized and disadvantaged communities requires a profound responsibility—a responsibility to be humble, compassionate, and above all else, honest. When Royo waxed philosophical, introspectively analyzing his role as both actor and representative, I couldn’t help but connect. As a qualitative researcher of urban inequality, I’m constantly dealing with the label of “privileged white guy that studies poor black people.” One the one hand, I feel a moral obligation to fight for those that are systematically disadvantaged. But on the other hand, such analyses can quickly become deeply paternalistic. Those that are familiar with my work and ideas know that I reject fetishizing “the other,” taking a comprehensive approach that avoids a singular focus on poor people of color. Still, the risk of exploitation never leaves the back of my mind. I never forget that I am making a career out of someone else’s life. I never forget who I am, constantly problematizing my ability to ever fully understand someone else’s world. And I never forget why I do it in the first place or why these issues matter. Like Royo, I constantly question myself, my work, and my role as a researcher.

Representing reality—be it on television or in academic research—requires a commitment to the craft of storytelling. But more importantly, it requires integrity. It was that integrity that made The Wire so powerful, and it is that critical honesty that makes good research. Urban polemics notwithstanding, this was the show’s most valuable lesson.

eCAT: Online Electronic Lab Notebook For Scientific Research

Nigel H Goddard , Rory Macneil and Jonathan Ritchie / Automated Experimentation / 2009 /  1:4  / doi:10.1186 /1759-4499-1-4 /  Published: 29 October 2009

Abstract (provisional)

Background

eCAT is an electronic lab notebook (ELN) developed by Axiope Limited.

[http://www.axiope.com/electronic_lab_notebook_index.html]

It is the first online ELN, the first ELN to be developed in close collaboration with lab scientists, and the first ELN to be targeted at researchers in non-commercial institutions. eCAT was developed in response to feedback from users of a predecessor product. By late 2006 the basic concept had been clarified: a highly scalable web-based collaboration tool that possessed the basic capabilities of commercial ELNs, i.e. a permissions system, controlled sharing, an audit trail, electronic signature and search, and a front end that looked like the electronic counterpart to a paper notebook.

Results

During the development of the beta version feedback was incorporated from many groups including the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research, Uppsala University, Children's Hospital Boston, Alex Swarbrick's lab at the Garvan Institute in Sydney and Martin Spitaler at Imperial College. More than 100 individuals and groups worldwide then participated in the beta testing between September 2008 and June 2009. The generally positive response is reflected in the following quote about how one lab is making use of eCAT: "Everyone uses it as an electronic notebook, so they can compile the diverse collections of data that we generate as biologists, such as images and spreadsheets. We use to it to take minutes of meetings. We also use it to manage our common stocks of antibodies, plasmids and so on. Finally, perhaps the most important feature for us is the ability to link records, reagents and experiments."

Conclusions

By developing eCAT in close collaboration with lab scientists, Axiope has come up with a practical and easy to use product that meets the need of scientists to manage, store and share data online. eCAT is already being perceived as a product that labs can continue to use as their data management and sharing grows in scale and complexity.

The complete article is [now] available as a provisional PDF

[http://www.aejournal.net/content/pdf/1759-4499-1-4.pdf]

The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production [10-29-09]

Source

[http://www.aejournal.net/content/1/1/4]

!!! Thanks To / Garrett Eastman / Librarian / Rowland Institute at Harvard / For The HeadsUp !!!

Republicans Wear Sneakers, Too

In 1990, Democratic challenger Harvey Gantt opposed Republican incumbent Jessie Helms in North Carolina's Senate race. Gantt, an early civil rights leader and Mayor of Charlotte, ultimately lost the election, thanks in part to a racially charged advertisement from the Helms campaign. The now infamous ad, “Hands,” depicted a white man crinkling up a piece of paper after losing his job to a minority, implying, of course, that unfair racial quotas were to blame. Written by Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, the ad would go down in political history as one of the more egregious (and successful) exploitations of white resentment for political gain.

When asked to endorse Gantt for the Senate seat, NBA legend and North Carolina native Michael Jordan refused, stating, “Republicans wear sneakers, too.” The implication was clear, and the message came through loudly: As an avid businessman and superstar athlete, Jordan was happy to shelve his politics—and self dignity, for that matter—in favor of merchandise sales.

Flash forward nineteen years. Last week, conservative radio personality and former ESPN NFL commentator Rush Limbaugh announced interest in buying the beleaguered St. Louis Rams. Rejecting Michael Jordan-style political ambivalence, players across the league openly expressed dissatisfaction. Mathias Kiwanuka of the New York Giants, for example, was quoted as saying:

"I mean, I don't want anything to do with a team that he has any part of. He can do whatever he wants, it is a free country. But if it goes through, I can tell you where I am not going to play […] I am not going to draw a conclusion from a person off of one comment, but when it is time after time after time and there's a consistent pattern of disrespect and just a complete misunderstanding of an entire culture that I am a part of, I can't respect him as a man."

Kiwunaka was not alone. In 2003, Limbaugh resigned as an ESPN commentator after making racially charged remarks about Donovan McNabb, suggesting that the Pro Bowl quarterback only reached stardom due to the media’s irrational desire for “a black quarterback [to] do well.” Current players, like New York Jets linebacker Bart Scott, have not forgotten these statements:

“It’s an oxymoron that he criticized Donovan McNabb. A lot of us took it as more of a racial-type thing. I can only imagine how his players would feel. I know I wouldn’t want to play for him. He’s a jerk. He’s an —. What he said (about McNabb) was inappropriate and insensitive, totally off-base. He could offer me whatever he wanted, I wouldn’t play for him. … I wouldn’t play for Rush Limbaugh. My principles are greater and I can’t be bought.”

In a league that’s between 60 and 70 per cent black, it’s more than a little insulting to imagine a man that once suggested the NFL “all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons” could become a team owner. In fact, it’s absolutely outrageous. That a man with such overt, explicit contempt for African Americans could purchase and control an organization that profits from the labor of black athletes signals far too much historical baggage to be appropriate. Sports hold a special, unifying place in American culture, and as a result shouldn’t be a venue that rewards bigotry and divisiveness. Limbaugh’s disrespect of the league, its players, and African Americans in general are all legitimate grounds to oppose his involvement with the NFL—all opinions, I might add, that exist above and beyond any objection to his political views.

Given Limbaugh’s long history of racially charged remarks, it’s not surprising that players were offended by his announcement. But what is surprising is the public nature of their comments. Normally, team owners work to thwart political activism and diffuse dissent among their players. Bad for business, per the Jordan model of merchandise sales. But with the controversy over Limbaugh’s announcement, professional athletes may be moving toward a new model of political discourse, rejecting the Jordan template and re-embracing self dignity. The recent news that Limbaugh was officially dropped from the group bidding to buy the Rams only underscores the potential power of civically engaged professional athletes. Maybe this is the dawn of a new era—an era of renewed self-respect, moral integrity and civic engagement—in professional sports.

Tony Kornheiser of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption made this very point earlier in the week, suggesting, “We are out of the Michael Jordan era where everyone wears sneakers, and back to the Jim Brown era of social activism.”

No complaints here.

Come Out, Come Out Whoever You Are(?): Outings in Popular Media

To be upfront about this post, it is a response to Bryan Safi’s video That’s Gay: Coming Out. Upon a cursory viewing of the video, one does get a sense of how coming out on popular shows has been constructed in a way to amp up the drama. On this point, I agree. In his comical framing and colorful presentation, however, I question if he does just as much of a disservice to coming out, or rather the choice/experience of coming out, by his depiction of the examples he uses. I will only say two brief points that I believe are overlooked in his “analysis.” And it must be noted that both points grapple with the same question: what about the nonmoments?

To begin, I quote one contributor over at Womanist Musings, the blog where I found this clip. She states that

Once again, [Safi] is so bang on correct. The way that coming out is constructed in the media is absolutely ridiculous. I mean seriously…they make it seem like someone is admitting to murder. Heaven forbid the media just have GLBT people going on with their lives just like everyone else. Oh no, we cannot possible portray being gay or lesbian as anything other than an oddity.

However, I wonder if the contributor to Womanist Musing listened/watched the entire clip. Safi mentions that there has been a proliferation of “outings,” both voluntary and involuntary, in recent history in the media (in this case speaking only to TV sitcoms). He states that “coming out” has been depicted in a number of ways and through various avenues and the like. In fact he outlines, again in a colorful manner, some himself. The question I have is, does this not speak to reality more than fiction? Is it a sign of times getting better and not worse? Though Safi doesn’t include clips from Grey’s Anatomy, for instance, there was an occasion with Cali where the more fanatical, hysterical “outing” didn’t happen. To use one example Safi uses himself, Glee, wasn’t Kurt’s coming out—both to Mercedes and his father—one of the modal occurrences? What about Calvin in Greek: Ashleigh thinking Calvin is hitting on her and she makes a move (a kiss) only to be stopped with the news that he is gay? I am not saying that this is in fact how everyone who is outwardly gay came out, but Safi’s portrayal, at least to me, sullies and minimizes those experiences.

Though I agree that “coming out” has been incorporated into scripts to draw in the crowds, I have to ask about the assumption that we are making about the entire cast of characters being heterosexual save for those who will be somehow marked as gay. I know that some will say this is a statistical fact; there are more heterosexual individuals than homosexual. This may very well be the case but we still see instances in popular sitcomes where we are left in surprise when we find out someone is gay and it is not an instance of the “Flaming Kamikaze” or the “Kanye West Swift Kick.” I think about Grant from Greek, a show that Safi himself uses twice as evidence for his producers using coming out as an attraction to lure viewers in. No one on the show knew that Grant, Calvin’s new boyfriend, was gay until he and Calvin started hooking up. It seems to me that from the position Safi puts himself in is one that assumes everyone is straight until proven otherwise. That, to me, is problematic in and of itself though I do understand that given the history of LGBQTI individuals in the media, it is a reasonable assumption.

When speaking of such an important life event in people’s lives I think we have to be a little smarter in our analysis even when trying to be snarky and comical. Sadly, Safi sensationalizes the outings in the same manner he vilifies the media for doing. Is that the pot calling the kettle black? Instead of taking a more exhaustive, panoramic view of the presence of LGBQTI individuals on television shows and their “outings” and lack thereof, Safi lets us all down, gay and straight alike.